Recently I was asked, along with a number of other former steelworkers, what it was like working at Christmas time in the various steel plants for an exhibit later in the year called “Christmas in Our Town” for the Steel Plant Museum of Western New York.

Recently I was asked, along with a number of other former steelworkers, what it was like working at Christmas time in the various steel plants for an exhibit later in the year called “Christmas in Our Town” for the Steel Plant Museum of Western New York.

Two books recently published offer suggestions about how to cope with the age of anger we live in.

'Unrelentingly anger' is what Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra calls it in his new book, “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”

What is he talking about?

It’s in our interest to analyze the rage of millions across the globe who, in many cases, have nothing else in common but their wrath. You can see how hard it might be, perhaps impossible, to help diverse groups of people with variable grievances predicated upon an apparent common cause.

Who makes this claim of rage and what is its cause? Pankaj Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist, has pinned the tail of anger on our age. The grievance of many is what he calls ‘modernity.’

Is this allegation accurate, and if so, why? Mishra makes the claim that people all over the world resent the idea of ‘modernity’, a concept which has promised much but delivered little.

People hate modernity, Mishra says. He calls a fake neo liberal capitalism. It is an almost 300-year-old mirage. It offers a philosophic cat-nip of equality and freedom to the masses, but delivers a dog-eat-dog brutality instead.

Mishra defines modernity as “the unprecedented political, economic and social disorder that accompanied the rise of the industrial capitalist economy” between 1750 and 1850. This allegation is the thrust of Mishra’s new book, “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”

Everybody, from metropolitan elites to high school drop outs to college graduates working part time jobs to terrorists in the Paris banlieues feel the unfairness of life on the sidelines.

Really? This is an overblown perspective according to Michael Ignatieff, President of Central European University in Budapest, in the April 6 issue of “The New York Review of Books.” He calls Mishra’s view “relentlessly dystopian” and lacking the causality, the connections, that produced world wars, totalitarian regimes and genocide in the 20th century.

Ignatieff notes the obvious, that not all anger is the same. Some of it is justified, other actions never are. For example, some anger – the shutdown of a steel mill employing thousands – is understandable, if regrettable. An act of terror that results in slaughter doesn’t make any sense at all. While Mishra would not justify terrorist acts, he does see terrorists as holy warriors against modernity, thus justifying their activity.

(A pertinent aside: President Trump won the last election by taking advantage of divisiveness and mean-spiritedness in the American electorate. He took advantage of angers that were obvious. If he maintains his role as a world-class prevaricator, while not delivering on promises made to his own cadre of antagonists, they will turn on him.)

In fact, as Ignatieff points out, modernity is a more complicated term. Modernity includes pluses and minuses: imperialism, oppression of women, racism, colonial conquest and war.

It also includes, he writes, the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the invention of penicillin, treatments for cancer and declines in polio and tuberculosis. Not recognizing modernity’s mixed nature gives nihilists victories these days that they do not deserve, Ignatieff concludes.

Ignatieff observes that "we are modernity”, and if we ignore our political will to set things aright, we do it at our peril. (Keep in mind that ‘setting things to right’ is not a new idea. It began with the Bible: helping the widow and the poor. There isn’t much new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes points out.)

This is where the value of Condoleezza Rice’s new book, “Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom”, comes in. Professor Rice gives us a careful look at the birth, life and struggle of global democracy.

Democracy has taken some hits, and has had some wins. Much depends upon the environment in which it grows. Her book is basically an affirmative look at how the individual and groups can achieve the political will to make a difference in helping it to grow.

Rice is presently a professor at Stanford University and was the first African American woman to serve as U. S. Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under President George W. Bush.

She takes us from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the ongoing struggle for human rights in the Middle East. She’s been there, done that, as well as having lived in Birmingham, Alabama as, a child, the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement for Black Americans.

What she has to offer is the democratic upside to Mishra’s gloomy view. Hers is an analysis of democratic wins and losses recorded around the world that she helped develop herself as a major force in American politics.

Rice has some advice for the hard slog forward based upon her own life: “These experiences have taught me that there is no more thrilling moment than when people finally seize their rights and their liberty. That moment is necessary, right, and inevitable. It is also terrifying and disruptive and chaotic. And what follows is hard, really, really hard.”

One great example: She cites Judge J. Waties Waring in a stinging dissent in a voting rights case in South Carolina in the late 1940s. “America, be what you claim to be", he wrote.

Such a ringing remark is even truer, if not always practiced, in our country today.

Michael D. Langan is the NBC-2.com Culture Critic. He has written for the BBC, The Dublin Review of Books, and numerous U.S. newspapers.